The giant phantom jellyfish (Stygiomedusa gigantea) is called that because it's really big and scientists don't get to see one often. Until fairly recently, trawl nets were used to bring up deep-sea specimens to study, and jellyfish have a tendency to fall apart in them before they reach the surface. However, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) sent down an ROV in November and caught this one in its natural habitat, at 990 meters (3,200 feet) below the surface.

At first glance, this jelly looks like a load of laundry floating in the water. But bear in mind that the bell is more than a meter (3.3 feet) wide, and the trailing "oral arms" can grow to ten meters (33 feet) long! Read more about the giant phantom jellyfish at MBARI, and see a longer video about this species.

The music on this video is nice, but I personally prefer the live reactions from the scientists back on the research ship that we are used to from MBARI. -via Boing Boing

(Image source: OldTownChode)

This item could have easily been shipped in an envelope. How many times have you ordered a small item that was delivered in a large box with packing peanuts or bubble wrap just to take up the excess room? Was a large box all they had? Or was it a consequence of warehouse workers under stress, not allowed enough time to go get a proper size box? Either way, it just adds to our landfills in the end. This also happens in stores, when a small item must be packaged in a wastefull manner to thwart shoplifters. The subreddit called EgregiousPackaging collects examples that can make you scratch your head.  



(Image source: cheeseball359)

This one is baffling. The soda is in a can, added to a plastic tray, then covered in shrink wrap. Commenters tell us this is a kit for marinading meat sold in China. You put your meat in the provided plastic tray and pour the Coke over it. Okay, but you'd think that anyone making something that involved would already have a bowl or something at home to put it in. Something they wouldn't have to throw away.

See 45 examples of very wasteful packaging in a gallery at Bored Panda.

Oh yeah, it's a good song, but non-stop Christmas cheer beginning the day after Halloween and lasting two months for 27 years straight is enough. If you've had it with Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," then this song is for you. Despite the fact that it was produced by There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), it's actually quite listenable. He took the vocals to Twisted Sister's song "We're Not Gonna Take It" and laid it over the Christmas tune. The video mostly comes from Mariah Carey's Magical Christmas Special. Even if you aren't tired of "All I Want for Christmas is You," you'll still get a kick out of this mashup. See, There I Ruined It doesn't have to ruin everything!  -via Laughing Squid

Besides having the coolest name ever, Hildegard von Bingen was a writer, a scientist, a healer, a composer, a visionary mystic, and a saint who lived in 12th-century Germany. She founded two monasteries and invented a language. Hildegard's life and list of accomplishments is long and involved, but Atlas Obscura focuses on her work with medicinal food and herbs.

Hildegard subscribed to the Latin medical theory of balancing bodily humors that was prominent in her time, with elements of astrology and theology added. She advocated for bleeding and using precious stones in healing. But she prepared medicines according to the practice that (mostly women) healers always used of going with what works, and learned the benefits of natural ingredients she grew in her garden. Hildegard also advised boiling water before drinking to prevent disease. Medical historian and physician Victoria Sweet tells us,  

“More of her cures worked than didn’t,” Sweet says, noting that many of her herbal remedies are as timeless as those within traditional Chinese medicine.

But the culmination of the article is the cookie recipe Hildegard left us. She made cookies prescribed for various ailments: ginger for constipation, licorice for nausea, and cinnamon and cloves for joy. You can't argue with cookies for joy, no matter what the flavor. Her cookies for joy are easy to make, and if you swap out molasses for honey, ginger for nutmeg, and add some leavening, it would be the same as the gingersnaps I made last week. Find that recipe and an overview of Hildegard's medical practices at Atlas Obscura. -via a comment at Metafilter 

Changi Airport in Singapore has been named the best airport in the world for eight years running now. It's beautiful, too. But besides being large and easy on the eyes, the airport has state-of-the-art infrastructure that helps it to run smoothly. Get a load of the conveyor belt that spits out your suitcase onto the baggage claim carousel. Each bag waits its turn for the perfect opportunity to jump in and join the gang! This is not only soothing to watch, it makes you wonder what else is going on behind the scenes at the airport that we'd be interested to know about. If only we could get interstate entrance ramps to work as smoothly, we'd be right proud. -via Nag on the Lake

There are more than a thousand species of barnacles, mostly attached to rocks, reefs, and boats. A few species specialize in embedding themselves into the skin of whales, on which they grow and ride until they die. An individual whale may carry around up to 450 kilograms of barnacles and their shells, so permanently attached that the whale's skin grows around the bottom of the barnacle shells.

The problem in studying whale barnacles is that they tend to die when removed from the whale or from the ocean, so not much is known about their life cycles. All scientists have to work with are dead whale barnacles. However, other scientists study the composition of clam shells, which build up over time like tree rings, to analyze the composition of ocean water in the past. Biology professor Larry Taylor thought trying that with whale barnacles, who build their shells much faster than clams, might reveal not only information about the barnacles themselves, but could provide a roadmap for where its whale traveled. And we have dead whale barnacles that range from recent samples to fossils. By analyzing the isotopes in the layers of whale barnacle shells, we can trace the migrations of whales through history. This opens up a whole new world of information about how whales evolve, migrate, and go extinct, plus the state of the world's oceans over time. Those old barnacle shells are like an archive of ocean history for those who know how to analyze them. Read what whale barnacles can tell us at Hakai magazine.  -via Metafilter

Pictured above is the CenturyLink Tower. At 11 stories and 174 feet in height, it is the tallest building in South Dakota. At least it is now. The Zip Feed Mill in Sioux Falls had a 202-foot grain elevator that was the tallest building in South Dakota from the time it was built in 1956 until it was scheduled for demolition on December 3, 2005. At that time, it became ...the second tallest building in South Dakota.

They don't build 'em like that anymore. Instead of coming apart under the stress of falling, the tower remained solid and just slid down into its basement, to much amusement from the crowd that had gathered to watch the demolition. However, it was quite tilted, so it was too dangerous to go in and rig it with explosives again. They ended up using a crane and a wrecking ball to take the tower down. You can read a history of the building here. -via a comment at reddit

(Image credit: TCN7JM)

It's December first; time to hang your Advent calendar and open up the first door! Neural network researcher Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) introduced an algorithm to the concept of an Advent calendar. This would be the old-fashioned kind before everyone expected chocolate, in which each of the 25 doors would open to a delightful picture. Shane instructed the neural network to follow a story involving a store called Shop of Strange Antiques that got an old Advent calendar with "atypical" images. The algorithm took that to heart. The image ideas were generated in text, then transferred to another algorithm to produce the pictures from the descriptions.   

Shane asked for "atypical," and that's exactly what she got. They are downright bizarre and therefore priceless. A pack of wolves playing poker. Santa Claus strumming a banjo on a trampoline. You get the idea. The Advent calendar has been posted at AI Weirdness in an interactive form in case you want to only open one image per day, or all of them today if you prefer. There were more than 25 images generated because Shane knew that some would have to be discarded, and yes, 20 more were unsuitable for small pixel images or otherwise unusable, but those are listed in a bonus post for your pleasure.

No Time to Die was the 25th film in the James Bond franchise, and the fifth Bond film starring Daniel Craig as secret agent 007. It's also his final Bond movie, which Screen Junkies agrees is enough, since Craig's Bond was just way too serious, emotional, and depressing. Too realistic, actually, even with the over-the-top gunfights, explosions, and violence. That said, No Time to Die had a respectable run, becoming the most lucrative American film so far in 2021. Yes, it's time for a new Bond, and maybe a return to a more lighthearted spy series. But please, not Chris Pratt.

Everyone's talking about the new omicron variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus. So far, we don't know all that much about it, but anecdotal evidence is that it may be less dangerous than the delta variant, even if it turns out to be more virulent. The word omicron has tripped up a lot of newscasters who've never heard the word pronounced before. Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, and not really heard much in English. However, it sure sounds like a science fiction term, doesn't it?

Filmmaker Christopher Miller took a poster from the 1966 movie Cyborg 2087 and altered it to what we picture when we hear "the omicron variant." The title follows the phrasing of science fiction titles like The Andromeda Strain or The Philadelphia Experiment (or The Shawshank Redemption or The Pelican Brief, for that matter). The only thing that would make this more fitting would be to slot in Charlton Heston in the lead role.

It turns out there have been several movies with omicron in the title, in 1963, 1999, and 2013. We nerds really like the Greek alphabet. -via Boing Boing

YouTube has decided to put an age restriction on this video, so you'll need to go there to see it. 

"It's like any of these traditional regional things that it wouldn't be allowed if you were to ask anywhere else in the world to do it now, innit."

For more than 400 years, Bridgwater, Somerset, UK, has celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, with plenty of gunpowder. The Bridgwater Carnival is held every fifth of November, except it was canceled in 2020 and scaled back in 2021. In a normal year, there is a full carnival including an illuminated parade after sundown. This year they still managed to do the traditional "squibbing," which involves a phalanx of 150 or so people holding fireworks over their heads. Tom Scott got a chance to investigate how the squibbs are made and used, which is just a little bit safer than the traditional ones from hundreds of years ago. He also got to participate in the festivities a few weeks ago, and seems downright giddy at the pyromaniac pyrotechnical display. A good time was had by all.

We've posted quite a few stories of how invasive species can wreck an ecosystem, but those stories represent a small minority of what we call invasive species. The truth is that species move all the time. About 90% of them die out in an unsuitable new environment. Of the remaining 10%, nine will settle in and cause no harm (like kudzu in America). That leaves only 1% of invasive species to make headlines for the damage they cause (like feral cats in Australia). Also, we usually assume that non-native species were transported by humans, such as the plant lovers who bought kudzu from Japanese merchants and the ship crews that carried rodent-hunting cats to Australia.

But there's another kind of invasive species that moves more and more each year- they are climate refugees. As the planet warms up, plants, animals, and other organisms wander further into areas that are becoming more hospitable than their original homes. Is this going to cause problems for existing species in those areas? Maybe, but it may also be the only way those refugee species can continue to exist. Read about this emerging phenomenon and its implications at Vox.

The production of glass goes back somewhere around 3500 years. Or at least we once thought so. Producing glass in those days required skilled artisans, or at least we once thought. Glass products were so expensive that they were reserved for royalty, we once thought. Scientists can tell where a glass object was made from the materials used to make or color it, we once thought. All these ideas about the origins of glass have been thrown into the wind with recent discoveries.

It's possible we will never know who invented glass, or where. The very nature of ancient glass shows that it deteriorates in humid conditions over thousands of years, so there may have been samples from its origins that simply no longer exist. Global trade in ancient times indicates that not only was glass imported, but also the raw materials once used to identify its origin. Therefore, glass found in one country, thought to be made in a second country, could have been partially made in a third country with imported ingredients from somewhere else. Partially made glass was shipped in ingots, as in the image shown above, to be remelted and fashioned by artisans into its final form elsewhere. You see how global trade in ancient times makes the story rather murky.

Throw in the fact that archaeologists once ignored evidence of glass when plundering artifacts, and modern archaeologists and material scientists have their work cut out for them. Yet modern technology that can analyze tiny samples of glass without damaging an artifact is helping scientists to learn amazing things about the ancient glass industry. Read about that line of research and what we've discovered at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Flickr user Panegyrics of Granovetter)

Merriam-Webster’s choice for the annual Word of the Year sums up what the English-speaking world has been talking about pretty well most of the time. Last year, they selected "pandemic." For 2021, the word everyone is using and wants to know more about is "vaccine."

"Vaccine" not only encompasses what was happening in the worlds of science and medicine, it also dominated the world of politics. It also affected the lives of millions of everyday people. Online dictionary lookups for the word "vaccine" increased 601% over 2020, and 1048% over 2019. The rate of lookups has remained high since its peak in August. The word was so hot that Merriam-Webster revised and expanded its definition.      

Besides the Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster names ten other words that define the language of the year 2021. They are: insurrection, perseverance, woke, nomad, infrastructure, cicada, Murraya, cisgender, guardian, and meta. Find out what they mean and why people wanted to look them up in 2021 at the dictionary's website.

PS: the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary selected "vax" as their Word of the Year. Great minds think alike.

(Image credit: Spencerbdavis)

Richard Gere & John Travolta pic.twitter.com/IDONfT667V

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Some people think that all corgis, or all German shepherds, look alike. People who have dogs know that's not true- every animal has a unique look and unique facial expressions. However, sometimes they share those unique looks with people you may recognize. Joaquim Campa collected quite a few pictures of dogs that you may have never seen before, but you'll recognize them right off.

Clint Eastwood & William H. Macy pic.twitter.com/eQDEseEeAq

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Those eyes! Those cheekbones! You ought to be a star! There are a lot more of these, and even when Campa ended his thread, plenty of other people came in to post dogs (and cats) who look like celebrities.

Vladimir Putin & Richard Branson pic.twitter.com/jsCUY9t6hp

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

You can see the pictures from Campa's thread all together at Threadreader, but you'll also want to check out the original Twitter thread to see the extra contributions in the replies. -via Everlasting Blort